Fear, killing animals, or refusing to eat them: 'Banel & Adama' (2023)
A Senegalese film compares our violence against nature to our fear of living amongst others.
Banel & Adama (2023), dir. Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Senegal
A few weeks ago I visited a temple1 with my mom and since then I haven’t eaten meat. I don’t know how or for how long vegetarianism will enter my life, but I know that I have never felt this way so acutely. A combination of things—the temple’s good vegetarian food, the time spent with my mom,2 my recent feelings of lostness, the sunset on our drive home, the genocide in Gaza,3 a few days playing Spore, and above all how much my cat loves me—all seized on me and insisted that I feel the presence of life on Earth as a miracle. I know that animals experience the world as I do; not that they experience it in the same way, but, just like I do, they experience it. That I don’t and can’t understand exactly how they feel the world makes this even more of a miracle; other beings exist here whose worlds feel so different from mine that they may construct different worlds entirely. The variety of life in existence multiplies and alters existence infinitely, and I now understand this as too precious to destroy.
In today’s film, Banel & Adama, humans kill animals out of fear and nature kills animals to punish humans. The film made me think about the relationship between animals and our emotions; how the way we treat them reflects our feelings about others, what that means for our place in a world that we do not master, and why I am not sure I want to eat them anymore.
Banel (Khady Mane) attempts to live outside of the world of others. She and her husband Adama (Mamadou Diallo) dig two abandoned houses on the outskirts of town out of the sand, intending to live in them; she implies to Adama that she killed her first husband, his brother, to rid herself of her marriage and legitimize their affair; and when the town’s elders ask Adama to take his place as chief after his father’s death, Banel resists, asking him for herself alone. The absence of a chief sets off a drought; first animals die, then children, but Banel continues to refuse to relinquish Adama to the community.
In a scene where the drought has advanced so far that the town’s residents can do nothing but languish in the sun, Banel writes “Banel & Adama” over and over again; her sweat drips onto the page and makes the blue ink run. She repeats their names as an incantation to bring their waning commitment to one another back to life, but it feels more like a curse of isolation: if she can affirm the existence of her and Adama alone long enough, the rest of the world might fall away. We see them in a mythic type of loneliness worthy of the film’s title (Judith & Holofernes, Tristan & Iseult, Banel & Adama), shot from below with the sun pouring light on their heads, or trapped under a net prism in blue light and an endless black void. The film ends apocalyptically with a sandstorm and feels like the end of the world in Melancholia (2011).
I believe, because of their mythic stature, that Banel can conjure isolation with names and Adama can conjure a drought with his intransigence. Like other figures from myth, though, they struggle to control their emotions, and Banel acts against the consequences of her self-enclosure with anger and violence mostly directed at animals.
First, we see her shoot a bird with a slingshot in the middle of a tense conversation with another woman in town. As the other woman accuses Banel of not deserving her relationship with Adama, the bird whistles like Banel’s building anger. She kills it, maybe to silence it or to act out an overpouring of rage. We later see Adama bury the bird. The score moved me very deeply here: Adama picks up the bird to strings plucking like her hopping around in life. He turns her over, the score drops for a moment, and we see her little eye still open. I thought about what was behind that eye and started to cry. The score strums back in and Adama covers the bird with a mound of dirt little enough for her little body.
Later, Banel kills a lizard. We see him crawling up a tree or a wall and when he stops Banel notices him, and I watch his heart beat through his skin. When I lie down in bed and breathe very still, I can sometimes see my own heart jump through my shirt. She shoots him with the same precise anger that she killed the bird with. She makes a fire and I assume she plans to cook and eat the lizards (she has killed several), an extreme measure she will take in the face of drought-induced famine. But she doesn’t eat them, she tosses them in the fire and watches them shrivel up. The heat tightens their skin and boils the tiny moisture in their organs, so I hear their bodies squeak.
The drought punishes Banel for her violence by killing every cow in the town until its desperate residents butcher the last one as it dies so as not to let the meat rot. Adama runs away with the cow’s death rattle in voice over and, soon after, he decides to take the role as chief. We never see the drought lift and Banel flees to the buried houses as the sandstorm comes on. I can’t know if Banel and Adama caused the drought by refusing to make themselves part of their community, but the drought makes their fear of social life into an ancient, mythic tragedy. This fear refuses life instead of embracing it; Banel kills animals, eliminating threats encroaching on her hermetic world, then flees when nature’s punishments force that world open.
Because Banel doesn’t eat the animals she kills and she doesn’t hurt any people, I think about her violence as both a punishment against nature for causing the famine and as a rehearsal for further isolation from the world. She doesn’t share the frame with her victims—she shoots the bird from off screen and the lizard from the blurred background—but intrudes on the space to wreak havoc in it. Other scenes reaffirm that she doesn’t belong “inside”: she and Adama dig their houses out way in the distance and we watch them from the town like their disapproving neighbors; she watches Adama at a meeting with the elders, from which a boy watches her in return, taking notes like an undercover agent. With the more mythic images, these scenes place Banel outside of shared life, where she can observe and pass judgement on it without opening herself to it.
At the beginning of this entry, I listed some things that coincided with my decision to stop eating meat. Most important, though, is how much less lonely I’ve been feeling lately. Most of my life I have feared opening up to others because I was gay,4 but recently I have taken a greater and more honest interest in my emotions, have spent more time with my friends, and have shared my emotions with them. With practice, I am learning how to live more socially; I am not as afraid as I used to be. Maybe I stopped eating meat to show gratitude to others, without whom this world would feel very lonely.
See other films from: 2020s | Senegal
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s essay. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
I can’t forget, though, that labor and migration lawyers have accused the temple of gross labor practices, including taking migrants’ passports and paying them very little under the pretense of religious volunteerism. It breaks my heart that I could find a new compassion for animals the way I did at a place whose owners refused compassion for humans.
That weekend, she gave me the Ram Dass book I mentioned in my last entry, Be Here Now.
My friend Georgia wrote a beautiful essay about the sanctity of life and the genocide in Gaza. She wrote, “I think about the children in Gaza. How do they like to play pretend? Which of their aunts and uncles is best at playing pretend with them? Is there an aunt like me who loves their nephew but is somehow clunky at hanging out with kids? What is her name?”
She also sent me this piece of George Eliot’s writing: “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
In The Beautiful Room is Empty, one of Edmund White’s characters calls being gay a certain kind of “sadness.” I think a lot about how we develop a very isolating narcissism from it; we fear others will reject us so badly that we constantly preoccupy ourselves with our images, as if others only think about us all day, and we become the very lonely center of the world.